Baladi News Sama Masoud)
Most of the Syrian cities suffer from sharp decline in education due to the harsh situations of war. Issued on 14 March, UNICEF “No Place for Children” provides statistics on the percentage of Syrian children who have dropped out of school.
The report reveals that 2.8 million children inside Syria have no access to education, and that only 6000 schools are utilizable within the war zones in Syria.
According to the report, as conflict reaches 5 years of time, 1 in 3 of all Syrian children has grown knowing only war or acquired poor or no learning at all. The educational process in the country has declined to the same level of 1980s. The latest UN statistics in 2013 also indicated that the enrollment of Syrian children in school fell to 30%.
Half of the number of children who left school is focused in Damascus and its countryside, Idlib, Aleppo, and Homs. In particular, schools of Aleppo shut down twelve days ago due to the heavy air strikes by Russian and Syrian air forces against rebel-held area.
Fatima Zahra, a school administrator in Aleppo, said to Baladi News, “I had 7 classes that included 250 boy and girl students before the latest campaign against the city. However, the school shut down and the students, along with their families, went into shelters,”
Fatima also indicated that “the number of students was low relative to the population in the neighborhood”, clarifying that several families abstained from sending their children to school either because of the bad situations or to force them into labor due to the critical need for money after the death of the breadwinners.
Furthermore, most school buildings were moved to basements, and teachers stopped going to schools because they have not received their salaries for months, which interrupts the educational processes in their classes.
All these factors contribute to the deterioration of education in this war-torn country.